Cold Blades, Chilled Fingers
by Spider and the Fly
Summary: A group of children have been left on Earth by Fate, to receive a destiny that will either save Earth or break it. Either way, Chaos is necessary to win an unfair fight.
1. Chapter 1: Snake-Eye's story

p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8000001907349px; text-indent: 0.5in;"span style="font-size: 16pt; line-height: 24.5333347320557px; font-family: Constantia, serif;"It's a late winter this year; just enough of a lag to create a safe opportunity for the birth of a boy who will walk the path his people have forgotten- but perhaps he's too early. These people do not need him./span/p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8000001907349px; text-indent: 0.5in;"span style="font-size: 16pt; line-height: 24.5333347320557px; font-family: Constantia, serif;"He's a small child, with long black hair and sparkling black eyes. His mother is alone, left behind by a man too quick in rushing to his death. They live atop a small hill at the edge of the village farthest to the West Wood's newest line of trees. Sometimes the boy swears he can hear birdsong mixed with the whistles of elves, perhaps faeries, but he wouldn't emswear/em on it, even if you could get him to speak aloud./span/p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8000001907349px; text-indent: 0.5in;"span style="font-size: 16pt; line-height: 24.5333347320557px; font-family: Constantia, serif;"He's a young age when the visions begin: images of himself, older, grown, clapping hands with tall, spindly figures with pointed ears and cat-slit eyes. His mother cries when he describes how he himself is different: white hair, blood-red eyes, a long, spiny scar-bruise looping around his entire body like binds and leaving its snake-head on his left cheek./span/p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8000001907349px; text-indent: 0.5in;"span style="font-size: 16pt; line-height: 24.5333347320557px; font-family: Constantia, serif;"They hide the visions from the villagers for another year before a neighboring girl finds the boy convulsing behind the goat-shed, covered in mud and drooling, eyes rolling and pained whimpers escaping clenched cheeks. She screams. The boy is found, his mother grabbed as well. She is accused of being a witch, a sorceress who has summoned a demon to reside within her child and curse them all. The boy cries, great dripping tears leaking from his eyes as he begs for them to understand, attempts to explain everything. No one listens. No one understands./span/p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8000001907349px; text-indent: 0.5in;"span style="font-size: 16pt; line-height: 24.5333347320557px; font-family: Constantia, serif;"His mother is hanged in the central square, her empty body hanging for days until the villagers are satisfied every bit of evil magic is gone and they take the husk down./span/p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8000001907349px; text-indent: 0.5in;"span style="font-size: 16pt; line-height: 24.5333347320557px; font-family: Constantia, serif;"The boy is silent, even as he is charged with death and sent to drown in a pot of cruddy water. The girl who found him is watching, eyes wide and trembling hands secured over her wilting mouth. He smiles for her, a gash across his face that should, for all purposes, be bleeding./span/p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8000001907349px; text-indent: 0.5in;"span style="font-size: 16pt; line-height: 24.5333347320557px; font-family: Constantia, serif;"It's not./span/p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8000001907349px; text-indent: 0.5in;"span style="font-size: 16pt; line-height: 24.5333347320557px; font-family: Constantia, serif;"Water flows down his dusty cheeks, into the muddy pot they're going to smother his breath into. He stares into it, wondering what it will look like when he's gone. Would the essence of his soul make it cloudy? Purify it? Or would it be just as dirty and choked with filth as it always was, as he soon will be?/span/p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8000001907349px; text-indent: 0.5in;"span style="font-size: 16pt; line-height: 24.5333347320557px; font-family: Constantia, serif;"He feels the village's strongest man grip the back of his head in a fist and closes his eyes, prepared for the empty pretense of struggle and a hollow justice. Victory and murder, in the name of a god who may not even exist./span/p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8000001907349px; text-indent: 0.5in;"span style="font-size: 16pt; line-height: 24.5333347320557px; font-family: Constantia, serif;"There's a thudding sound, and the grip loosens. His eyes fly open, right into the liquid silver of an elf. The sly smile etched across the creature's face is wide and exhilarated as it breathes, em"Ready to go yet, little one?"/em/span/p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8000001907349px; text-indent: 0.5in;"span style="font-size: 16pt; line-height: 24.5333347320557px; font-family: Constantia, serif;"The village burns bright that night./span/p  
p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0px; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12.8000001907349px;"span style="font-size: 16pt; line-height: 24.5333347320557px; font-family: Constantia, serif;"(0)/span/p 


	2. Chapter 2: Longfinger's story

Longfinger says that humans don't understand the rituals of the elves and thus dub them as evil or demonic, such as the visions adolescent elves receive when their ears grow out and their eyes slit, like a precursor for the elf blood to show itself physically. He says Snake-Eye (the boy's new name is accurate, seeing as his visions came true in the form of an elven sickness that left him with a serpentine scar-bruise) may go wherever he likes and is not confined to the forest. Snake-Eye stays and watches the girl from the forest, naming her in his head. He practices the elven art of healing, marveling at his elongated lifespan and the glassy quality he can see in most human's eyes. The ones without it are part elf, he learns, but they never received their visions and walk on in a facsimile of the life they could have had.  
Longfinger warns him that some of the elves are less accepting of questions on their human lives and will not appreciate that way of getting to know them. He tells Snake-Eye his own story as an example. Snake-Eye listens in fascination and growing pain for his friend.  
(0)  
There is a city, far from the coast and settled quite comfortably in the shadow of its own smog, that is much like Snake-Eye's own village in terms of acceptance.  
Longfinger's arm was not as beautiful and streamline back then as it is now, long needle-like arcs of black glass. It is slender and breathtakingly graceful, strong enough to catch teenagers falling from trees in one hand. It becomes a sword when Longfinger needs a weapon, though he prefers to use his throwing darts in a fight.  
Back then, maybe fifty years ago (and here Snake-Eye trembles to think his petite (for an elf) friend is at least forty years older than him), it was clunky and blister red, frightening to the average citizen of the city Longfinger inhabited. He'd had a different name then, something short and modern and hollow. His mother had called him a devil and tossed him out, so that his visions began early, his body sensing his predicament and jumpstarting the process.  
He was drawn to the forest by his instincts, knowing the humans would hate him even more with his cat's eyes and snake's tongue. His pointed ears were too long to be hidden, so that was an issue even before his eyes or tongue.  
He met friends there, a boy and girl who swore their mates, the voices in their soulsongs were in that city, walking and breathing and laughing. But they were young, and full of sunlight and soft grass and long thick tree branches that lifted them to the sky and higher and so didn't know of the way of the world of elves.  
They found their mates buried under the grime and rubble of a collapsing city the following summer, while a massive earthquake ripped the building and streets in two and turned to stone where they stood, as elves always have.  
When a mate dies before it's time, it's elf will turn to stone to be preserved for when the mate returns to this earth.  
Longfinger dragged them to the safety of the woods and watched as the trees and bushes curled gnarled roots and scented flowers around their feet and climbed upwards, into their hair and illuminating their now-grey eyes.  
This city is nought but a dream now, an empty waste of fallen cement and toppled skyscrapers, but Longfinger says it was beautiful once, as beautiful as humans can get.  
(0)  
"And what were their names?" Snake-Eye squeals excitedly, bouncing on his stump like a small child. Longfinger smiles at him, tired but indulgent, and murmurs, "Twitchtoe and Letterlighter. Perhaps someday I'll take you to see them, hm?"  
And then he stepped away, that elven grace apparent as he swayed around trees and ducked under branches.


End file.
